Always Bad Incentives. Always.

Nathan Newman's penned a post criticizing me for giving Wal-Mart a pass on their efforts to cherrypick employees so as to keep their health care costs down. He writes:

Employers shouldn't be excused for completely rotten, immoral activities just because a better policy would make compliance with the law easier. This is bleeding heart liberalism applied to the largest corporation on earth, as if Ezra is excusing some kid caught purse snatching with the excuse that society had failed to provide better economic alternatives to a life of crime, so it's really society's fault that the victims lost their property.

But Nathan's got the situation wrong. Wal-Mart is very much abiding by the law. And as they voluntarily expand their health coverage far beyond anything required by statute, legality is even less in question. There's no question that Wal-Mart is fulfilling their legal obligations, what Nathan wants them to do is move towards altruism in employee benefits, exactly what they've spent the last few decades proving totally outside of their corporate character. Nathan continues:

Bashing the government for Wal-Mart's actions is just bad politics. Talking about the incompetence of government in designing our health care system as an argument for entrusting government with MORE responsibility for managing that system is probably the most self-defeating approach possible. But the more large corporations like Wal-Mart are attacked by the public for their health care policies, the more those companies will have an incentive to push for national health care to relieve the pressure on them.